Trump administration immediately starts trying to muzzle scientists

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If you put a frog in a pot on the stove and turn up the heat, according to the story, he’ll stay there until he boils to death, never having noticed the incrementally increasing danger. But we busted that myth. What actually happens is that the frog gets uncomfortable and jumps out of the pot, staring at you reproachfully until you start questioning every life decision that led you to try to boil a frog.

Do you know the Benny Hill theme? Remember it. Get the tune in your head. I want you to be thinking of “Yackety Sax” when you read this.

Memos obtained by different media outlets show that the Trump administration has ordered scientists at the EPA not to communicate with the public, and definitely not the press. They also show that, despite earlier reports, Trump has not attempted to put a gag order on the USDA.

An oil and gas offshore well platform. Credit: EPA

Silencing the EPA

Within hours of Trump’s swearing-in ceremony, an email was sent to employees in the EPA’s Office of Acquisition Management. “New EPA administration has asked that all contract and grant awards be temporarily suspended, effective immediately,” it said. “Until we receive further clarification, which we hope to have soon, please construe this to include task orders and work assignments.”

Trump’s assertion of control over the EPA makes sense in light of his campaign’s vendetta against climate science. Trump-appointed EPA spokesperson Myron Ebell defended the memo, telling ProPublica that a budget freeze is not without precedent during the transition between presidents. Ebell is a vocal climate change denier with no scientific credentials, who has taken oil money to lobby for the idea that climate change science can’t be trusted. He pulls strings behind the scenes in a way not unlike those Bush administration luminaries involved in the fundamentally neoconservative, oil-funded, power-brokering Project for a New American Century. Second, Trump is the guy who claimed global warming was a Chinese hoax meant to make the US less competitive in trade, and he just gave a Monday morning executive order for a total hiring freeze on the government. It’s not a big leap to imagine that he might also seek to put his tiny, cold hands on government agencies associated with the environment, climate change and other things he doesn’t understand.

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

Doug Ericksen, the communications director for Trump’s transition team at the EPA, insisted that the Trump administration hadn’t made any specific demands about the climate change page. During the same press meeting, he also said that any and all data produced by the EPA, including the climate change page, will have to be approved by political appointees. Ericksen, a Republican lawmaker from Washington, is a political appointee and climate denialist with the dubious honor of being on the AP’s list of recipients of the most lobbyist money, much of it from fossil fuel companies. “We’re taking a look at everything on a case-by-case basis, including the web page and whether climate stuff will be taken down,” Ericksen told the AP. “Everything is subject to review.”

As we all know, telling people a problem doesn’t exist makes the problem go away. Therefore, taking down the EPA’s climate change content and attempting to censor their data will make climate change not be a problem. It’ll be tremendous. Everyone will be very pleased. In seriousness, the EPA needs an offsite, pseudo-official mirror of all their currently hosted site content, like yesterday.

A demonstration of how an edge-of-field monitoring station works and various interseeding approaches in agriculture. Credit: USDA

Playing telephone

The dust-up at the USDA started when Sharon Drumm, chief of staff for the USDA’s research arm (the Agricultural Research Service, or ARS) sent out a memo. “Starting immediately and until further notice, ARS will not release any public-facing documents,” Drumm wrote in a department-wide email originally reported by BuzzFeed. “This includes, but is not limited to, news releases, photos, fact sheets, news feeds, and social media content.”

While Trump’s name wasn’t on the memo, a whole lot of outraged people immediately assumed that it was being circulated at his behest. But the USDA immediately started backpedaling. USDA spokespeople rescinded the memo and have been rushing to reassure the public. Acting deputy administrator Michael Young said that the ARS memo was released without his involvement, and that it contradicted guidance he’d issued the same day. He further stated his official guidance does not prohibit scientists from publishing in scientific journals, does not place a blanket freeze on press releases, and does not prohibit food safety announcements.

“The ARS guidance was not reviewed by me. I would not have put that kind of guidance out. My guidance has to do with policy-related announcement and that sort of thing,” Young told the press Tuesday evening. “I had my memo drafted before the ARS memo, I was not a part of it.”

The Washington Post published those comments along with the more measured official memo, which originated with Obama appointee Tom Vilsack and emphasizes that press releases and policy statements need to go through the office of the secretary for approval before they go public. “In order for the Department to deliver unified, consistent messages, it’s important for the Office of the Secretary to be consulted on media inquiries and proposed response to questions related to legislation, budgets, policy issues, and regulations,” it said. “Policy-related statements should not be made to the press without notifying and consulting the Office of the Secretary. That includes press releases and on and off the record conversations.”

From the Washington Post:

Young stressed that he is a “career official,” not a partisan appointee, and said that the memo he issued closely mirrored one sent at the beginning of the Obama administration. He also said he shared the memo with Trump transition official Sam Clovis before issuing it.

“This is really just formalizing again what is fairly standard practice within the department. I just felt like, yeah, I want to be cautious because I don’t want any surprises on my watch. I was trying to avoid any surprises,” he said.

A new War on Science

BuzzFeed quotes Gretchen Goldman, of the Union for Concerned Scientists, as saying that there’s no precedent for large-scale communication freezes like this. But of course there is. And it worked so well when Canada did it. In November, my colleague Graham Templeton detailed how the Harper government muzzled scientists under the optically pleasant auspices of presenting “a more coherent, curated face for government research, leaving the media stuff to real media professionals and thus making sure that government communication is effective and efficient.” The Harper administration forbade scientists from publishing their work where the public could conceivably get at it, or even talking about it, period. Thousands of scientists lost their jobs. The physical contents of science libraries were thrown in the trash and hauled away.

That administration’s War on Science left no aspect of the environment alone. Beyond climate change, the Harper government attacked the institutes and individual scientists doing research on air and water quality, and even fisheries and forestry. Clearly it was just a big coincidence that those are the areas of science which most often produce reports contrary to the interests of Canada’s mining and petroleum industries.

So it looks likely that we’ll have our own War on Science. But let us not lose hope. Responses present themselves. We should immediately take advantage of the Streisand effect and release to the public all non-classified research, even paywalled research, performed with public money. We paid for it with our taxes, including and especially the prior art of the EPA and any other government agency, and we the people deserve to see the fruits of our contributions. There should be a web hosting entity that immediately pops up to do this, whose backend and terms of service are explicitly developed for indexing, mirroring and protecting scientific data. It should take a lesson in where it puts its servers from the Pirate Bay, which has yet to be actually taken down successfully. It should take a lesson from the Canadian artist and legal acrobat who, to ensure that a pipeline would not go through his property, copyrighted the statue garden he created in his backyard as a work of art and thereby defied the oil-funded Harper administration.

How will we pay for the hosting without access to tax funding from a hostile government? It’ll have to be privately funded. Scientific publishing outlets like Springer, which owns Nature and its properties and publishes climate science, should join forces with journalistic cornerstones like the New York Times and the Washington Post — and their armies of lawyers who know how to protect people who publish unfashionable information despite legal onslaught. Philanthropists like Gates, Buffett, and Bloomberg should be banging on the door to help resolve the financial aspects of tearing down the paywalls without breaking publishers’ responsibilities to copyright holders.

The water is heating up. Get uncomfortable. President Trump can decide not to allocate any more money insofar as he has that power. But we as a country cannot, must not, will not tolerate the systematic destruction of our Fourth and Fifth Estates.

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